Monday, April 6, 2009

Moving & Material Wealth

Ahh, springtime. When a young man's fancy turns to love.

I however, being 30 (by no means OLD, I know), obey no such missive. My fancy has turned to solitude, and as such I find myself separating MINE from HERS, packing my life into a number of cardboard boxes, and seeking a new place to call home.

Not wanting to go into detail about this division, suffice to say the prospect of having a home all to myself for the first time since spreading my wings and departing the parental nest is one of the most positive feelings I have ever felt. Ever.

That having been said, the interim period of packing and moving is - and always has been - a torment that I would expect reserved for one of the deepest layers of hell.

Maybe it's the ability to see what typically represents a person's life, distilled down into the contents of a number of boxes.

Maybe it's the notion that one's life can be represented by a collection of "stuff".

While my bitterness is typically reserved for the acts of ignorance and and selfishness committed by mankind, in this case it is directed toward a more abstract villain - mankind's (and specifically, my own) way of acquiring a sense of accomplishment through the act of collecting material posessions.

In my heart, I know that I don't need all the things I have. I collect films out of habit, justifying each needless purchase to myself in a variety of ways - I need to listen to the director's commentary to aid in my film studies, this new edition has all new documentaries that the last 4 versions I purchased didn't have, this one is a limited edition and if I don't buy it now, I'll never have another opportunity. And yet despite being able to observe the situation rationally, it does nothing to deter my absurd spending habits, and thus a 6th copy of Night of the Living Dead enters my collection.

And to what gain? I've seen these movies a dozen times over, and yet I keep buying them every time they get rereleased. And they keep getting rereleased because people like myself keep buying them! It's a vicious circle that I perpetrate against myself.

It is a similar situation with my collection of books. As a writer, I must be an avid reader - no good writer doesn't read; writing skill can be honed via osmosis. As a complete nerd, I also play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, which means owning a vast collection of those books as well. Leave it to me to choose the heaviest hobby I could think of. A box of 20 hardcover books weighs enough to throw my back out. My collection presently fills 12 of those boxes, none of which I particularly want to carry up and down any flight of stairs.

And yet I continue. Even now, as I prepare to transfer the last of my posessions into boxes I find myself wandering the aisles of (popular Canadian electronics store) investigating the newest Blu-Ray releases (this, despite the fact that the Blu-Ray player is not among the posessions moving with me), and a shipment from (popular internet shopping service) is days away from my mailbox with three new books and a dvd.

In this, I have only myself to blame.

And even now, knowing that this problem persists, I wonder, if I could put an end to this cycle, would I?

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About The Author

The Author is a 30-year old human male and lives alone.
His short fiction and film reviews have appeared on a variety of websites.
He writes this blog under the cover of anonymity.
He hates humans and would enjoy the world much more if he were the only one on it.
He regrets that this blog is not a work of fiction.